


Nomenclature

by scribefindegil



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Fluff, Gen, Humor, Linguistics, Stanford Pines and the Hundred Kindly Alien Moms, laadan, portal ford
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-16
Updated: 2016-07-16
Packaged: 2018-07-24 10:42:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7505134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scribefindegil/pseuds/scribefindegil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The alien who's looking after Ford gives him a nickname in a language he can't understand. He hopes it means something cool.</p><p>It doesn't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nomenclature

Ford opened his eyes to see a cavernous maw looming above him. The triple rows of razor teeth were spread in a wide grin, deep purple saliva oozing between them. A long tongue, rough and forked and plum-colored, licked across the beast’s lips. Above the mouth, a pair of luminous blue eyes were fixed on him. They weren’t sharp enough to be hungry, filled instead with an aloof sort of amusement.

Zette laughed throatily and began to groom his hair.

Ford sighed, surrendering himself to the giant feline’s ministrations. “What did you save me from this time?”

“Pirates,” she purred.

“What, again?”

“You do seem to attract them, _áruli_ ,” she replied, pinning him in place with one enormous paw so he wouldn’t keep toppling over when she licked his head.

Usually, the translator implant he’d had installed over his right ear would pick up on the local languages and present them to his brain in English. Not that there hadn’t been a few mishaps over that—no translation software was perfect, and there had been the issue of unforeseen connotations. He shuddered. At least now he knew never to ask for the train schedule again.

The first time he’d met Zette, when he’d crawled into her colony’s cave during a storm and impressed her by growling and baring his teeth when she confronted him, he’d asked her why the language she and her sisters spoke among themselves didn’t get picked up by the translator implant. She’d just laughed and smiled enigmatically.

Despite his best efforts, he couldn’t get a handle on the language, which seemed to amuse the creatures even more. He’d picked up on a few aspects, but most of what they talked about continued to elude him. That included, unfortunately, his nickname. As far as he knew, it was just their word for “human,” though he hadn’t seen any other humans on this planet.

He not-so-secretly hoped that it was something about bravery. Surely that was what had impressed her and inspired her not to eat him. Perhaps it was an honorific. He’d asked her before and she’d refused to tell him.

He considered asking again, but elected to keep his mouth shut. After one of Zette’s grooming sessions, his hair and parts of his coat would be purple for weeks. He wasn’t sure what would happen if he ingested any of the purple liquid she was coating him with, but he wasn’t keen to find out.

***

“Well,” Ford did his best to look cool and imposing, like an interdimensional traveler should. It was a little more difficult when his hair was stuck in floppy purple spikes. “I’d love to stay longer, but this dimension is controlled by my enemy—”

“Bill- _lh_ ,” Zette spat. The one thing Ford had been able to pick up about the language she spoke was that they could insert a phoneme like a cat’s hiss anywhere in a word to indicate disgust. He’d tried it himself a few times, and it was the only linguistic experiment that hadn’t gotten him laughed at. “Voiceless alveolar lateral fricative,” he’d written in his notes. “Appears only in words with negative connotations and may be added to other words at will.”

“Yes. Bill- _lh_. I must leave here and continue to seek for my home dimension. Until we meet again!”

“Ah, _worahesh woháruli_ ,” Zette purred. “I’m sure that will be sooner than you think.”

***

 _You’ve been in worse scrapes than this_ , Ford reassured himself. _Plenty of them. Really, this is nothing._

At the moment, however, he did have to admit that things weren’t looking good. He’d thought it would be easy to give these pirates a false map to Zette’s lair and earn himself the cash to get off-world. They’d certainly looked stupid enough. The fact that he was currently bound spread-eagled to the side of their spaceship while several of them pointed weapons at him suggested that, just perhaps, he’d misjudged.

“You have no idea who you’re talking to,” Ford bluffed, wishing he’d manage to hang on to his gun. “I have earned the trust of the beasts that dwell in these hills and walked among them unharmed! I am known among them as _worahesh woháruli_! You should fear my wrath!”

Most of the pirates didn’t react, but one of them seemed nonplussed. He saw her lips move as she muttered, “Adjectival prefix . . . small . . .”

She raised her eyes, and her gun, and cocked her head at him. “You’re a small irresponsible baby cat?”

For a moment, Ford was speechless. Then, as he heard a familiar thrumming purr begin behind him, partially masked by the space pirates’ laughter, he sighed.

“Apparently I am.”

Zette dropped into the open door of the spaceship. She was grinning and her hackles were raised. Before the pirates could fire their guns, she roared and sprayed them with venom from the stingers in her forked tail.

As the pirates collapsed in agony, she sauntered over to Ford and licked his head. “You do know how to get yourself into trouble, _áruli_ ,” she chided.

 _Small baby cat_ , he thought, as Zette slicked his hair up into spikes. _Of course_. Given the circumstances he could hardly argue.

“This one wasn’t entirely my fault,” he protested. “You know that your species’ pelts are worth a fortune on the black market. They were getting too close, so I gave them some information of . . . questionable authenticity, they realized, there were disagreements . . .”

Zette smiled, showing him all three rows of her teeth. “Shall we eat them?”

“Um,” said Ford. “None for me, thanks.”

She shrugged, a motion that involved her entire body and took quite a long time.

“Suit yourself.”

She leapt.

***

“So, that thing you call me . . . does it really mean . . .?”

“Wayward Kitten would be a better translation,” said Zette.

Ford sighed. “Of course.”

“Well,” said Zette, picking him up and depositing him with the litter—the _rest_ of the litter, he corrected himself—on the floor of the cave, “You are very small. And very foolish.”

One of the kittens mewled and pawed at something in its sleep. Was that really what he looked like to them? He thought back over the times Zette had seen him, usually far over his head and trying ineffectually to talk his way out. He didn’t suppose that he could blame her.

Ford lay back. The dreaming kitten hooked a paw around him and he was pulled into the pile of warm, sleeping bodies.

Tomorrow he’d strike out on his own again. Tomorrow he’d keep looking for a way home. Tomorrow he’d be Stanford Pines, renegade, on the run from the authorities of this dimension and more others than he could count.

He snuggled deeper into the furry nest. Tomorrow he’d be a traveler. There were perks to being a kitten for tonight.

**Author's Note:**

> Zette speaks (what I'm pretending is a less cringeworthily second-wave version of) Laadan.


End file.
